Syrian troops backed by Hezbollah fighters seized a key rebel supply town on the Lebanese border on Sunday, driving them from the area and scoring a major blow against them in the three-year-old conflict.

The fall of Yabroud immediately emboldened government forces to
attack nearby rebel-held towns, pressing forward in what has been
nearly a year-long advance against rebels fighting to overthrow
President Bashar Assad.

Support from the Iranian-backed Shia Hezbollah appears to have
tipped the balance in the border area, even as it has partly
prompted the conflict to bleed into Lebanon where it has ignited
sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shia.

In Lebanon, 13 people have been killed in Syria-related violence
in recent days: 12 in gun battles and one in a rocket attack. And
in the capital, Hezbollah supporters celebrated Yabroud’s fall with
celebratory gunfire in Shia-dominated areas, while youths on
motorbikes waving the yellow Hezbollah flag noisily roared through
the wealthy central district.

Yabroud was an important supply line for rebels into Lebanon,
and overlooks an important cross-country highway from Damascus to
the central city of Homs. It was the last major rebel-held town in
the mountainous Qalamoun region, where Assad’s forces have been
waging an offensive for months to sever routes across the porous
border. Its fall comes just a week after the Syrian army seized the
village of Zara, another conduit for rebels from mountainous
northern Lebanon into central Syria.

Syria’s state television reported that military forces were
removing booby traps and bombs and hunting down rebel strongholds
in Yabroud.

“Our armed forces are now chasing the remnants of the terrorist
gangs in the area,” said a uniformed soldier speaking on Syrian
television. “This new achievement... cuts supply lines and tightens
the noose around terrorist strongholds remaining in the Damascus
countryside,” said the soldier.

Syrian officials refer to rebels as “terrorists”.

A spokesman for the Islamic Front, a rebel coalition, said
fighters fled the hills that overlook Yabroud before Syrian army
troops entered.

Captain Islam Alloush said other rebels later fled Yabroud
overnight, collapsing the ranks of fighters. “There’s no doubt
Yabroud had big strategic importance,” he said. “This will make it
easier for the regime to occupy other nearby villages.”

He said the biggest immediate loss would be that rebels now had
no way of supplying ranks in rural Damascus where Syrian forces
have surrounded a series of opposition-held areas, denying them
food, power and clean water.

Gunfire and clashes could be heard on footage broadcast live by
the Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen and Hezbollah station al-Manar. It
showed troops walking through empty streets.

A black flag used by Syria’s al-Qa’ida affiliate, the Nusra
Front, still flapped from a building near what appeared to be an
abandoned rebel army post painted in the colours of a flag used by
other rebels: green, white and black.

Kasem Alzein, a Syrian pro-rebel doctor who lives in the nearby
Lebanese border town of Arsal, said a hardcore group of fighters
decided to remain in Yabroud to fight to the death. Three other
activists also said rebels aimed to drag Syrian army troops
into street-to-street fighting, where they believed they had
an advantage.

“They don’t want to surrender,” Alzein said, even as he
acknowledged Yabroud’s loss. Alzein said he hoped rebels could
still find a way across the border.

“They can’t close all the mountain pathways. God willing, God
will open a path for us,” he said.